Hi all. no Pathfinder 2E Gamemastery Guide review again this week. I have been building my online game to play a supers game. I have also been reading the Gamemastery Guide but there has been a lot of out of hours work so it is just not getting read quick enough! The thing that has really been affecting my week is the use of resources in creating my campaign. Last week I discussed Realm Works and I have been working on creating my Pathfinder 2E game. As such I have been keeping an eye out for resources to include and I found out that there are some resources far rarer than others out there in the land of the interwebs.
Content Creation for the Campaign
Ok, I am a content creator. That is certain. But in a campaign, I need to balance the elements that are truly me with those that I can use from other sources. For example, I am an OK map creator, but there are other sources out there with excellent maps that you can turn to for your own purposes. Just throwing a few names out there, Dyson Logos, Matt Jackson, Monkeyblood Design all offer some great material that I love to appropriate to the games that I am creating. I can create maps, but looking at their materials make it feel professional. Mine is amateur at best.
It was along the lines of this that I realised that some things are much rarer than others in the interwebs. I have been working on locations and encounters for my games. I have been downloading maps for encounters and locations that will eventually populate my world. I have been getting loads of material and it is all being incorporated into the systems I have in place. The thing is though, these locations and encounters are all being built but they have no actual location to occupy in the world I am creating, yet.
Concept of the Campaign
I have a clear vision for this campaign. It has been in my head for a good decade now. I even ran a single session of it for a group in an encounter. The world is one that has suffered great fractures in the past. The kingdoms of the land are so past the fractures that they have forgotten that they occurred and then are revisited by the past. The whole feel of the game is going to be enveloped in a “Grimms Fairy Tale” kind of vibe.
I have specific needs in the locales and places of the world that the players will interact in. The thing is though, I have no overall structure for that space. It is all concepts of encounters and locations, but no real skeleton of how all of this fits together. This is not a bad thing in my eyes, it meant that I could incorporate a world map from another provider and make it my own.
Rarity!
It is this week that I realised that the campaign maps of entire game worlds are a real rarity! I can find maps of taverns, castles, dungeons and cave systems, but trying to find a continent or world map is near on impossible. When you search this material there is a BUNCH of digital tools that advertise for your purchase to create your own, but little in the way of prepared material. Not to say that I did not find some, but the ones that I did find just were not suitable for what I had in mind!
I came across maps that were close to what I needed, but the naming conventions of towns and cities were not to my liking. I always knew that I would likely have to build my own world map but there is so little to go on with this. I once read a post on a map that someone had put forward, tearing the content apart. There was a discussion of trade winds and coastlines that I just did not understand! Admittedly, I do not think my material will be widely shared, but I do not want to make a pitiful attempt at it either.
Wish me luck
I have bought a book for this campaign and I will soon start to put together the continent(s) that the players will interact with. There are certainly some very specific details that I need to hit with this so wish me luck. Once I have that together I will start to incorporate some of the locations I have built into it. Once this is all done I will be able to apply the Pathfinder 2E treatment to it as suggested by the Gamemastery Guide, or switch to Dungeon Crawl Classics if the system loses me. Wish me luck!